The Carving
In the documents of Vatican 1 and Vatican II there’s an image of God, when creating Adam and Eve, seeing, in imagination, a unique man, Jesus, who would exist in the distant future. It was God’s image of God’s own self-made human in a real person. As he shaped and moulded Adam and Eve from the mud, his artist’s eye was on that inner picture of divine incarnation in a certain baby, nearly 14 billion years later, 2000 year ago. In creating the world God was preparing the way for the Messiah. Jesus was imagined, from the beginning, in the divine heart before he lived in space and time.
God created everything with so much love at the beginning. God could not wait to become human at the heart of creation. It is Love from the start. Creation was Love’s first step towards living in space and time. Not all that long ago that Love emerged in the shape of a baby.
We are Love incarnate. Our very being, our energy, our life-force is what we call God. God fell in love with the world long before He fell in love with Mary. God was incarnate in the world long before he became incarnate in Mary. The religions of the world are too small for big souls. Self-protective churches stifle souls who need infinite breathing space.
There’s a story about a country bot in Carolina who had a great talent for carving dogs out of wood. Every day he sat on his porch whittling away, letting the shavings fall around him. One day a visitor, very impressed, asked him the secret of his art. ’I just take a block of wood’, he said, ‘and whittle off the parts that don’t look like a dog.’ He had a clear picture of the dog in his imagination before he created the actual wooden dog.
Again, there’s a more famous story when Michelangelo was asked, ‘How did you know there was David in the marble?’ His response, ‘In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I only have to hew away the rough walls that imprison that lovely apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it. I just took away everything that was not David. I carved until I set him free.’
From the beginning people have had some notion of a deeper, higher self within them. At the first Christmas it was revealed to the world that this inner self was none other than God’s own self. Now we all have a clearer idea, an astonishing intuition of our true inner self. This is what we’re after.
We continue to do our whittling, carving; we make the effort. We go to Mass when we can, we say our prayers, we go off things for Lent, we diet, do Pilates, do the Camino; we prepare for Advent, we go on retreats, we read books. We are full of hope, still searching, still believing in God’s love for us – but not always believing the picture I’ve just painted of our deepest selves being divine. Most Catholics still do not believe that because we were never really told that.
How can we purify, nourish, perfect our souls, grow from the image to the likeness of God, as expressed in Eastern Christianity. Baptism speaks of a promise to be fulfilled – we are baptised by the daily waters of our life that grows and ripens the seed within so that we can blossom. It is about re-discovering the lost inner child; relinquishing the False self to become the True self: reclaiming our lost voice; not relying on outer authority but trusting inner authority. It is about making the inner journey and doing the inner work. The sculpting, creating, crafting stories only just hint at the transforming work that needs to happen within us.